Great Throughts Treasury

"The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government." - Thomas Paine

"Uncritical reverence for the Founding Fathers was less ubiquitous while they actually lived. . . . The Reign of Terror that raged in America during the latter end of the Washington Administration, and the whole of that of Adams, is enveloped in mystery to me. That there were men in the Government hostile to the representative system, was once their toast, though it is now their overthrow, and therefore the fact is established against them." - Thomas Paine

"The essence of politics is compromise." - Thomas Macaulay, fully Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

"Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"History reports that “the men who can manage men manage the men who manage only things, and the men who manage money manage all.” So the bankers, watching the trends in agriculture, industry, and trade, inviting and directing the flow of capital, putting our money doubly and trebly to work, controlling loans and interest and enterprise, running great risks to make great gains, rise to the top of the economic pyramid." - Will and Ariel Durant

"The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied nature intently, and discover an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms which in other countries she lavishes in wild solitudes are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes." - Washington Irving

"Every cook has to learn how to govern the state." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman nor an Empire." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset." - Victor Hugo

"It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like." - Victor Hugo

"Be full of humility; have faith in human goodness." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Few maxims are true from every point of view." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Religion, in its purity, is not so much a pursuit as a temper; or rather it is a temper, leading to the pursuit of all that is high and holy. Its foundation is faith; its action, works; its temper, holiness; its aim, obedience to God in improvement of self and benevolence to men." - Tryon Edwards

"True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain which is fed from the deep heart; and it is only when age warms its withering conceptions at the memory of its youthful fire, when it makes experience serve aspiration, and knowledge illumine the difficult paths through which thoughts thread their way into facts,--it is only then that age becomes broadly and nobly wise." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it." - Edwin Way Teale

"The blind man is not blind by birth, but he became blind with little effort. He has a camera, he takes it everywhere, and he just loves keeping his eyes closed. He walks about as though asleep, he has seen absolutely nothing as yet, and already he is shooting it, for when all things lie next to one another, equally small, equally large, always rectangular, orderly, cut off, named, numbered, proven and demonstrated, then you can see them much better in any event. The blind man saves himself the trouble of viewing anything beforehand. He gathers the things he would have seen and piles them up and enjoys them as though they were stamps. He travels all over the world for the sake of his camera, nothing is far enough, shiny enough, strange enough—he gets it for the camera. He says: I was there, and he points to it, and if he could not point at it he would not know where he had been, the world is confusing, exotic, rich, who can retain it all." - Elias Canetti

"Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger